Jeffrey Alexander

Jeffrey C. Alexander is the Lillian Chavenson Saden Professor of Sociology at Yale University. With Ron Eyerman, he is Co-Director of the Center for Cultural Sociology (CCS). Jeffrey Alexander works in the areas of theory, culture, and politics. An exponent of the “strong program” in cultural sociology, he has investigated the cultural codes and narratives that inform diverse areas of social life. His most recent paper in this area is “Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and Strategy,” Sociological Theory, 22. He is the author of The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology (Oxford, 2003), Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (with Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser, and Sztompka, University of California Press, 2004), and The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim (2005), which he has edited with Philip Smith. With Bernhard Giesen and Jason Mast, he is the editor of Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual (Cambridge, 2006). In the field of politics, Alexander has written The Civil Sphere (Oxford, 2006), which includes discussions of gender, race, and religion, as well as new theorizing about social movements and incorporation

Recent Publications:

Books

• Alexander, Jeffrey C. (2012). Trauma: A Social Theory. Polity.
• Alexander, Jeffrey C. (2010). The Performance of Politics: Obama’s Victory and the Democratic Struggle for Power. Oxford University Press.
• Alexander, Jeffrey C., and Kenneth Thompson (2008). A Contemporary Introduction to Sociology: Culture and Society in Transition. Paradigm Publishers.
• Alexander, Jeffrey C., and Steven Seidman (2008). The New Social Theory Reader, Second Edition. Routledge.
• Alexander, Jeffrey C. (2006). The Civil Sphere. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Alexander, Jeffrey C., Bernhard Giesen and Jason L. Mast (2006). Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics and Ritual. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Alexander, Jeffrey C., and Philip Smith (eds.) (2005). The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Alexander, Jeffrey C., Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka (2004). Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
• Alexander, Jeffrey C. (2003). The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Articles:

• Alexander, Jeffrey C. (2004). “Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance Between Ritual and Strategy,” Sociological Theory, 22 (4): 527-573.
• Alexander, Jeffrey C. (2004). “Rethinking Strangeness,” Thesis Eleven, 79 (November): 87-104.
• Alexander, Jeffrey C. (2004). “From the Depths of Despair: Performance and Counter-Performance on September 11^th,” Sociological Theory, 22 (1): 88-105.
• Alexander, Jeffrey C. (2003). “Towards a New, Macrosociological Theory of Performance,” Theory, Spring: 3-5.
• Alexander, Jeffrey C. (2002). “On the Social Construction of Moral Universals: The ‘Holocaust’ from Mass Murder to Trauma Drama,” European Journal of Social Theory, 5 (1): 5-86.

Earlier Publications:

• Published Articles, 1977–2006.

Courses and Seminars

Undergraduate

• SOCY330, Civil Society and Democracy.
• SOCY352, Material Culture.

Graduate

• SOCY525, Cultural Sociology: Theory and Research Programs.
• SOCY567, Cultural Performances. The Whitney Seminar on New Perspectives in the Social Sciences and Humanities.
• SOCY628, Workshop in Cultural Sociology.